In this blog post, I will attempt to argue that the campaign settings inside Google AdWords define your destiny or fate online. The 2 categories to be discussed are as follows: basic settings and budget options.

The basic settings category asks advertisers to do the little things like simply name the campaign and define its start date and end date. On the surface, the category is simply an attempt to promote products online. Beyond the basics, the category suggests or requests well defined targeted campaigns:

• Restaurant – 2 Can Dine for 1 – Steak & Lobster Dinner. Reservation Required (Dec 15 – 21)
• Garage – Free Oil Change with Every Tune Up (Tuesday And Thursday AM)
• Movie theatre – $1.00 off popcorn with coupon. (Star Wars – Return of the Yeti)

Unlike specific conversion metrics that are defined inside Ad Groups, advertisers receive real metrics from well defined targeted ads because sales changes as a function of online advertising. In other words, the advertiser has more reservations for steak and lobster dinners because they are advertised online.

The budget options category asks advertisers to recommend a daily budget. Surprisingly, this simple question may be the most important question that an advertiser examines for 2 reasons: first, the AdWords budget is spread across a variety of media that include: Google search, Google partner search, and the content network – which is another tiny universe unto itself; and this means that advertising is not just occurring inside Google but in a variety of online properties; second, compared to other media--television, radio, newspaper, magazines, and trade journals--advertisers should be prepared to pay a comparable amount to convert browsers into buyers, generate sales and build brand and reputation online.

Generally, established businesses know theses costs, and consequently, the transition from the offline to online world is smoother. Small businesses, in contrast, struggle because they attempt to accomplish a variety of assumed advertising goals – branding, sales, reputation management, customer service, and promotions – from $10 per day. The cost effectiveness of Google AdWords may be its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. The ancient parable holds true online – the big fish swallows the small fish!

The budget options category contains another valuable tool that often goes unnoticed – the delivery method. It is, in my opinion, more a question of character and corporate culture than of speed or efficacy. Businesses that find themselves using Gorilla marketing tactics to get in the face of customers and never let them never forget that you offer the lowest price in town, should adopt an accelerated delivery method. Businesses that prefer customers who have thought about the decision before investing should consider a gradual delivery method. Despite my interpretations of these concepts, the true difference is that whereas the gradual delivery method means that ads will be shown equally over time, the accelerated delivery method means that ads will be shown as quickly as possible.

Alright, get your mind out of the gutter....were talking about websites. When planning to build your online empire one questions that repeatedly comes up is whether to build one giant website, or create a number of smaller separate sites.

While each site presents its own set of unique circumstances I would advice that in most cases you will want to build one big site. Google seems to favor large sites and I can understand why. Search engines are looking to give users the best experience possible, so if a website has plenty of related content then searchers are probably going to be able to find what they were searching for.

Take advantage of the influence that these sites are given by continuing to build out your content with more articles or blog entries. This should not only help with your top keyword phrases but also with small long tailed terms that can help generate traffic which you wouldn't have normally seen.

What about sub-domains you may ask? Some developers like to break up content this way but I would suggest that this is not the answer. Search engines see sub domains much like they see separate websites. By separating your site into different sub domains you really aren't doing yourself any favors and you won't see the benefit that you can get with one large site.

Remember, just because large sites tend to do better doesn't mean that you should combine your 'pet food' and 'movie review' sites. Search engines can take into account the overall theme and as they continue to get smarter will also get better at differentiating sites that don't provide users a good experience. Also, from a usability perspective having various off-topic sites all bundled together just doesn't make sense.

It's all in the way you move it.

OK, perhaps you have recently built a few small topic related websites and want to consolidate them into one. The best thing to do would be to use a 301 redirect. By using this you will not only be redirecting the website, but you will be redirecting any links that it may have acquired.

Many of you don't have to imagine what it's like to type your name or your company's name in Google and find search results that paint you in, shall I say, a less than positive light. And none of you have to imagine the kind of impression this leaves with people who are looking you up.

Your online reputation doesn't just depend on the press releases you send out, which journalists or bloggers they reach and how these outlets spin your brand. The real battleground for your online reputation is across the online arena in almost all the places where you or your industry are topics of debate, discussion or competition.

Circumvent the Democracy

This online battle is more democratic than ever. These days any individual with a grudge can have one of the loudest voices when it comes to who you are in the online arena.

So how does one battle against the tyranny of this online democracy? If it's a person with a grudge, It's always advisable to start with contacting them and trying to reach an agreement or understanding. If that doesn't work, or if your online image is tarnished by unflattering news articles, then its time to implement a more aggressive campaign.

Outrank negative search results with pages of your own until the bad publicity is pushed down to pages that most people just don't look at. You do this by optimizing your existing pages for the search engines, and creating even more pages that will outrank and quell the banter that's harming your online reputation.

Always Tread Carefully

You don't want to make this investment and have it backfire on you. Search Engines rank pages on the basis of relevance and trust; the pages you optimize have to communicate this not only to the search engines, but to users.

If you're going to dominate the first pages of search engine rankings with your own results, make sure your pages are worth being there. Crowding Google's results with pages that are juiced with links but deliver no real value to the people who will be consuming the information is spamming, which is invariably BAD 'netiquette'. You need to put in your time and understand how to play within the guidelines of the unspoken laws of the web.

Be truthful regarding the content of the pages you are optimizing and engage people in honest conversation; that's how you develop real trust online. This is doubly important in the more social aspects of online communications. More to come on that soon...

On Tuesday the 4th of December from 7:00AM to 9:30AM at the Terminal City Club, 837 West Hastings Street, Vancouver VKI Studios with be hosting the first WAA & eMetrics breakfast event.

This event will feature Jim Sterne, founder of the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summits, and founding Chairman and current President of the Web Analytics Association. Jim will be speaking about the current maturity of the web analytics industry. He will share insights into the level of expertise among today's practitioners; challenges they face; the opportunities that are available; and the role we play as companies adopt the continuous improvement method of marketing optimization (at VKI Studios we have branded this as our Hippo Tango service) and truly start listening, engaging and participating in a dialogue with customers.

In addition to Jim's presentation I will be presenting a recent case study that we have put together on marketing/landing page optimization. This case study will focus on the use of web analytics and testing (in this case Google Analytics and Google's Website Optimizer) and the importance of planning and process to maximize results.

This event is targeted at people who want have an interest in marketing optimization, web analytics, and testing. I hope that attendees will gain a solid understanding of the current state of the analytics arena from Jim and an appreciation of the benefits of becoming a data driven organization and the importance of planning and process from my presentation.

Click here to register

Analytics audits are usually customer focused, so don't get too upset if the below process is missing some steps that you think your audit should include. My intention for posting was to give a little insight into what an Analytics Audit can look like.

Ensure your site is reporting accurately. Can you be confident in the action it suggests you should take?

• Analyze URLs
  • find the identity of referring websites
  • analyze URL structure to ensure organized analytics data;
• Analyze URL parameters
  • document URL parameters and identify their adverse affects
  • distinguish between parameters that make pages unique and those that are simply for tracking purposes
  • ensure your web analytics platform is configured correctly for the parameters
  • provide your development team with parameters "best practices" for your specific requirements
  • perform monthly parameter audits
• Analyze cookies
  • review and document reliability and P3P privacy sensitivity of the cookies you analytics depend upon
  • review and recommend vital first-party cookies best practices
  • measure your cookie rejection and deletion rates
• Visits, Visitors and Unique Visitors
  • explain precisely how these two critical metrics are being computed
  • interpret these metrics in terms of your web analytics tool
  • examine the impact of how your site is dealing with sessionization
  • check the impact of your cookie handling on these vital KPI's
• Time on Pages/Site
  • Examine how this metric is measured on your site
• Page Views
  • a page naming strategy is fundamental to meaningful, actionable analytics. We begin with your site's strategy and the analytic's implementation of that strategy.
  • most rich media or AJAX websites incorrectly implement analytics. We examine its implementation and make specific, actionable recommendations to correct the implementation.
• Filtering Analytics data
  • explain the impact of the rules, repercussions and exclusion on your data collection and reporting
• Conversion funnel accuracy and verification
  • identify your site's fundamental eCommerce and other success events (sales, downloads, leads etc).
  • examine their tracking and display to ensure they point to weak points in the conversion process
• Campaigns
  • review for proper tagging and accurate identification of your traffic sources
  • Correlate this audit with an audit of your Ad Word ROI for more actionable management of your monthly spend.
• Search Engine Traffic
  • examine the accurate identification of your site's Organic Search success and extract recommendations for improvement
  • correlate with an SEO audit to deliver a comprehensive action plan to explain visitor paths to your site and increase rankings and referrals
• Optimization
  • identify weak areas degrading your site's conversion rates
  • propose A/B testing techniques to have your visitors point you to more compelling methods to achieve conversion success

"My name is Michael and I am a web analytics... oholic?"

Yes, I'll admit it: I find my self logging into Google Website Optimizer at all hours – day and night, weekends included – to ensure our freshly-optimized pages are reaching their goals.

I also place bets with co-workers. We'll try to predict which version of a page will perform best, and by what margin it will beat the existing page.

It's embarrassing sometimes:

• Excusing myself from a dinner date, so I can log in to see whether my revised "buy now" button is outperforming the old one.
• Being caught squealing with joy because I've correctly predicted the lift a revised headline will make.
• Predicting a revised photo will improve conversions by 20%... only to find it reduces them by 23%. The agony of defeat!

No, this isn't a cry for help. Please, no interventions. I just wanted come clean and admit I have a new addiction.

Anyone else suffering similar symptoms?

About a week ago Google introduced a new feature in Google Webmaster Central to associate a geographic location with website.

It is a great way for webmasters to tell Google more about geographical location of business associated with website. Country association has impact on search results. Visitors from particular country will see more websites associated with this country in search results. At the same time country oriented searches (for example, restriction 'pages from Canada' in Google.ca) will show websites associated with particular country only.

Search engines can determine the location by using top-level domain names. For example, websites within top-level domain .ca are associated with Canada. Situation with not country specified domains is different. Search engines can use hosting IP address to determine the location of hosting server and associate it with domain. It is not the best way because many websites have country related or language oriented sections in sub-domains or directories.

Now you have an ability to show Google geographical location you would like to associate with your website. Basically, you need an account in Google Webmaster Tools.

After login you can go to Tools --> Set geographic target. There is a form to select country/region, put street address, city/town, state, zip code. You can specify geographical location for entire website, particular sub-domain or directory. It is very useful if some parts of websites are oriented on visitors from specific countries.

Please note that in field City/Town you have to use upper case characters only. And field State should have text code of state or province (for example, HI for Hawaii). If you put full name of state (for example, Hawaii or HAWAII) you will see "No such State/Province in this country. Please enter a valid State name (or Province name)". It is weird but this is way how it works.

This new feature is a big step for Google to allow webmasters provide more information about websites. However, some websites (or sections of websites) are language oriented. Would be great to have an additional feature to associate a website or part of website (sub-domain or directory) with particular language.

My background is in advertising. Many years ago, I read the classic book by Claude Hopkins, Scientific Advertising. The crux of the book is very simple: that advertising should be based on A/B testing and numbers, not just creative hunches.

Hopkins' Scientific Advertising is one of those books that everyone in the advertising industry has read and raves about. David Ogilvy claimed it changed his life, even stating that no one should be allowed to practice advertising until they'd read the book seven times!

And yet, rarely do advertisers actually heed Hopkins' advice and test their ads, one version against another, to determine which approach works best. Instead, they take what they think is their best idea, and run with it. In other words, they guess!

I believe there are three reasons why A/B testing is so rarely done in traditional advertising:

1. Budget. It's expensive enough to produce one ad. Producing a second, test ad is seen as wasteful.
2. Inertia. A/B testing isn't part of the established process.
3. Ego. To succeed in advertising, you must have confidence in your ideas. To admit you're not sure which approach would work best is... well, something most people in the advertising industry just can't do!

And so, Claude Hopkins' ideal of scientific advertising remained largely unrealized despite its unquestionable validity. Advertisers paid lip service to the book's principles, but rarely implemented them.

All this is about to change, at least in the online world. With Google Analytics and Website Optimizer, there's simply no reason not to A/B test one page against another:

• The tool (Google Website Optimizer) is free
• The cost of producing an alternate web page is low (in many cases, free)
• Data collection is free and fast
• In no time, you know which version performs best

Hopkins wrote his classic book in 1923 and died in 1932. But I suspect that if he were alive today, he'd be a big fan of Google Website Optimizer!

Google AdWords consists of four basic elements: campaigns, Ad Groups, keywords and Ad Text. Briefly, campaign settings examine 7 critical questions:

1. What geographic area do you want to target?
2. How much can you afford to spend to dominate your market?
3. What languages do your target customers speak?
4. What time of day do you expect the most sales, and when can you best answer questions?
5. Do you know the ads that convert best?
6. Do you know the position that leads to the most conversions?
7. Are there words or ideas (negative keywords) that you do not want your business associated with?

These critical elements will be examined a post that will follow; however, the intent of this article is to discuss the structure of Ad Groups. Each is comprised of Ad Text, keywords, and a landing page. Together, these 3 components comprise a perfect triangle, if you think that way, or cube (as in 2 cubed) if you visualize things that way too.

You need to work backwards to build solid Ad Groups. Use the landing page (or discrete page on the website) to determine keywords and phrases to include in Ad Groups. Based on the words, group them as ideas, thoughts or spellings. The tighter the concept loops or circles that you can form the better. Create Ad Text that copies or mimics the selected keywords. Place the keywords in Ad Group named similarly.

Under optimal conditions, there will a 1 – 1 correspondence between all parts of an Ad Group – the landing page scores a 10/10, the Ad Text scores a 10/10 and the keyword scores a 10/10. If you look at things this way, you can see why a website that scores a 30/30 cannot be beat.

The strong Ad Group is structured as follows:

Landing Page (score is 10)
"Everything you need to know about buying ford cars."

Keyword (score is 10)
buy ford cars

Ad Text (score is 10)
buy ford cars

The strong Ad Group structure leads to good click through rates and strong conversions.

The weak Ad Group, in contrast, is structured as shown:

Landing Page (4) a picture of a Ford Mustang

Keyword (6) ford cars

Ad Text (9) Ford Mustangs Sale

This weak Ad Groups lead to strong CTRs and low or no sales.

The purpose of this article is to suggest that Google AdWords is not a flat search for keywords. It is a solid object or cube that intends to interacts with your website and potential customers. To get the right customers to your website, it needs three strong critical elements: landing pages, keywords, and Ad Text.

Optimizing your website takes both time and money. Effort is put into on-page optimization such as adjusting title tags and building content. Hours are spent building contacts and acquiring links from authorities in the industry. And after all of this work has been put into building a website that will rank for its keywords and start brining in revenue, owners forget things like basic maintenance.

By neglecting to maintain your website you are placing the rankings that you have worked so hard to obtain in jeopardy. Search engines are trying to produce results that lead to a good user experience. If a user types in 'Blue Widgets' and clicks on a website that is full of broken links, then their user experience will be poor. Broken links is a common and easily rectifiable maintenance issue that may be hurting a website.

If your website has a blog which is open for anyone to post comments on, you will want keep a close eye on it to prevent people from posting spam to unrelated topics such as 'diet pills' and 'Viagra'. External links that don't contain 'no follow' tags are basically seen by the search engine as an endorsement. The last thing that you want is for Google to think that you're endorsing a site to an unrelated 'bad neighborhood'.

Make sure that your site never goes offline. If your website is located on an unreliable server which frequently goes down you should find somewhere else to host it. This is obviously a no-brainer but many people forget that this will have a negative effect on their rankings. If search engine spiders visit your site and find that it periodically goes offline you will see this reflected in a drop in rankings.

It's easy to get to forget issues such as making sure that the link you put up three months ago is still pointing to a live website, but it's important to check. The last thing that you want is for your websites rankings to be held back from its full potential due to simple maintenance.